Spies Like Us: A Conversation With John le Carré and Ben Macintyre

BRISTOL, England — Their subject is spying. Their obsessions are secrecy and betrayal. They are Englishmen of a certain background, old friends and admirers of each other’s work. One writes novels; the other, nonfiction. They speak in practically perfect sentences.

Conversations between John le Carré and Ben Macintyre are inevitably warm, interesting, witty, discursive, conspiratorial and gossipy, although their gossip is often espionage-related and more rarefied than yours or mine. They met for lunch recently, on a desultorily sunny weekday in a private dining room at a boutique hotel in Bristol. Le Carré, 85, had been driven from his home in Cornwall (he also lives in London) by his family’s “outdoor man,” responsible for yardwork and other outside-the-house tasks; Macintyre, 53, had come by train from Winchester, where he had been speaking at a literary festival.

As usual, they were in the midst of a flurry of projects, finishing things up and starting new ones. Le Carré, who over a 56-year career has virtually single-handedly elevated spy novels from genre fiction into works of high literature, has a new book, “A Legacy of Spies,” coming out in September. Thrillingly for his admirers, it is a coda of sorts to “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” (1963), the third of his two dozen novels and the one that for many readers serves as the gateway drug to full-blown le Carré addiction.

Macintyre, meanwhile, is a longtime columnist for The Times of London and the author of 11 elegant, authoritative and dryly humorous nonfiction works, focusing most recently on 20th-century British espionage. He has a deep appreciation for the amusing and the absurd. His most recent book is “Rogue Heroes,” about the origins of the British special forces unit; he is working on a new one, about a Cold War spy case.

Early in his writing, le Carré introduced the subversive hypothesis that the spies of East and West were two sides of the same tarnished coin, each as bad as the other. It was a stunning idea, espionage painted not in black and white but in shades of gray. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the author lost the scaffolding for his fiction. His later books are angrier, more polemical, their worldview darker, reflecting the chaotic morality of the post-Soviet era and often presenting the United States — with its exceptionalism, its flouting of international norms, as he sees it — as the villain in the post-Cold War era.

“A Legacy of Spies” returns to the past from the vantage point of the present. Elderly and retired to France, the ex-spy Peter Guillam, an old acquaintance of the attentive le Carré reader, is made to answer for long-buried sins when the adult children of the two principal casualties in “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” suddenly bring a lawsuit against the security services. Guillam is forced to revisit the dubious setup and muddy justification for that operation, answering awkward questions from humorless young officials who have no patience for or understanding of how the agency operated in the old days. Even George Smiley himself makes an appearance.

The publication of the new work is being treated as a major literary occasion in Britain. A reading and Q. and A. at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Sept. 7 will be broadcast live in theaters in Britain and Europe, and shown in movie theaters in the United States and Australia in the fall.

In real life, le Carré is known as David Cornwell. He took his pen name to keep his day job — spying for Britain, which he did in the 1950s and early ’60s — separate from his writing identity. Over a bottle of white wine and, among other things, smoked salmon served under a glass from which clouds of smoke actually billowed out, he and Macintyre needed little prompting to speak. They all but interviewed themselves.

The interview has been edited and condensed.

S.L.Let’s talk about the new book, David. It’s been a long time since you wrote about the Cold War. Why did you want to revisit it now?

J.L.C. Because it seems to me, as Smiley says at the end of the book, that what happened then turns out to have been futile. Spies did not win the Cold War. They made absolutely no difference in the long run.

I wanted to take the characters and apply the experience of my own life, and examine what happened to them from a human, humanitarian dimension. And then place the whole story in this vacuum in which we live at the moment, which is occupied by really threatening forces. What marks the Cold War period is that at least we had a defining mission. At the moment our mission is survival. The thing that joins the West is fear. And everything else is up for grabs.

S.L.Ben, you have said that David’s work had a big influence in your becoming interested in the world of espionage. Which of his novels did you read first?

B.M. Oh, I think it was “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.” It had a profound impact on me. I always felt that the books were deeply based in experience. It’s no accident that some of our greatest writers have been spooks — Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, Priestley and you, David.

Spying and fiction are not entirely different processes. You try to create an artificial world. And the better and more realistic and more emotionally believable you can make that world, as either a spy or a novelist, the better you are going to be at it. These are characters who make up their past, who make up their present and who try to imagine a future.

J.L.C. And you must also contemplate all the varieties of a person’s character. Could she be this? Could he be that? Can I turn him or her into that other person? All of those are actually the serious preoccupations of a novelist. One of the fascinations of the intelligence world is that it’s such a reflection of the society it serves. If you really want to examine the national psychology, it’s locked in the secret world.

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David Cornwell, a.k.a. John le Carré (left), and Ben Macintyre over lunch in Bristol, England, last month.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

As it turns out, both le Carré and Macintyre were recruited by Britain’s intelligence services as young men. Their experiences were starkly different. Le Carré, whose childhood was awful and whose father was a notorious con man, signed up. Macintyre, approached by a professor in his final year at Cambridge and interviewed by someone called “Major Halliday,” demurred.

J.L.C. Ben came from a secure family, nice background, interesting father, all of that. [Macintyre’s father was a history professor at Oxford.] But I felt in a curious way that I needed a stable institution, and more than that, a kind of paternalistic institution. I mean, I was brought up middle class, but I came from the criminal class. And that made me enormously attractive to the spies, because larceny was built in.

B.M. It was the typical sort of tap on the shoulder. It was quite amusing, really. A don that I didn’t know terribly well came barreling up and he said, “What are you doing after university?” I said, “I don’t really know.” And he said, “Well, there are some parts of the Foreign Office that are different from other parts of the Foreign Office. In a sense, they are different from the Foreign Office itself.” He went on for about five minutes. Of course, I knew exactly what he was saying, although he never actually said it.

So I went along to Carlton House Terrace [where MI6 had an office]. And there was very clearly more than one Major Halliday, because other people I know were recruited by a completely different Major Halliday. Mine had on socks and sandals, which was quite upsetting at the time.

I was flattered and interested, and David was probably responsible for my interest. I just thought that the characters seemed so complicated and fascinating and corrupted. I mean, there’s something very louche about British intelligence, something very unmoored. I don’t know whether it creates people who go off the rails, or whether you have to be slightly off the rails to want to do it.

S.L.What happened then?

B.M. I had one other meeting.

J.L.C. And no lunch?

B.M. No, it never got to lunch. I was headed off to America, and it wasn’t going to be my scene. But I was very fascinated by it, for nonfiction purposes. There’s something about writing about this world that enables you to write about the sort of things that novelists usually write about — loyalty and love and betrayal and romance and adventure. And because spies invent their world, and often invent their pasts, they’re tremendously unreliable narrators. You have a wonderful backdrop of truth and nontruth to work against.

David’s novels are so brilliant because they’re emotionally and psychologically absolutely true, but of course they’re novels. And what I try to do in mine is write something that truly reads like a novel but nonetheless cleaves closely and absolutely to what happened.

S.L.Is there something about the British psyche that makes spying, or at least duplicity, an enticing prospect?

B.M. We Brits are particularly susceptible to the double life, aren’t we? Is it because we are a sort of theatrical, and sort of unfaithful, culture?

J.L.C. I think it’s because hypocrisy is the national sport. For our class in my era, public school was a deliberately brutalizing process that separated you from your parents, and your parents were parties to that. They integrated you with imperial ambitions and then let you loose into the world with a sense of elitism — but with your heart frozen.

B.M. There is no deceiver more effective than a public-school-educated Brit. He could be standing next to you in the bus queue, having a Force 12 nervous breakdown, and you’d never be any the wiser.

J.L.C. When you’ve become that frozen child, but you’re an outwardly functioning, charming chap, there is a lot of wasteland inside you that is waiting to be cultivated.

S.L.David, you’ve spoken about your childhood, your outrageously criminal father, how you were sent to boarding school when you were 5, the lies that permeated everything. How did all this come to play when you were recruited by MI5?

J.L.C. The truth, in my childhood, didn’t really exist. That is to say, we shared the lies. To run the household with no money required a lot of serious lying to the local garage man, the local butcher, the local everybody. And then there was the extra element of class. All my grandparents and all my aunts and uncles were entirely working class — laborers, builders, that sort of thing. One of them worked up telegraph poles. And so out of that to invent, as my father did, this socially adept, well-spoken, charming chap — that was an operation of great complicity. And I had to lie about my parental situation while I was at boarding school. I only mention these things because they’re the extremes of what can warp an Englishman.

B.M. What you’ve just described — is it the root of your fiction? Your ability to think yourself into someone else?

J.L.C. Absolutely. I mean childhood, at my age, is no excuse for anything. But it is a fact that my childhood was aberrant and peculiar and nomadic and absolutely unpredictable. So if I was in boarding school, I didn’t know where I would be spending the holidays. If my father said he was going to come and take me out, it was as likely as not that he wouldn’t show up. I would say to the other boys, I had a wonderful day out, when I had really been sitting in a field somewhere.

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The young David Cornwell at home.CreditRalph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

The mixture of solitude and uncertainty fertilized the situation enormously. To which you must add the amazing cast of crooked characters who passed through my father’s life. Inevitably I was making up stories to myself, retreating into myself. And then there was the genetic inheritance I got from my father. This was a man who, while still being pursued by the police, or bankrupt, or Christ knows what, who had done prison time, then boldly stands as a parliamentary candidate. He had a huge capacity for invention. He had absolutely no relationship to the truth. He would come talk to me in the morning and I would challenge him, and in the evening he would say, “That’s not what I said to you.”

S.L.Do you see parallels with President Trump’s view of the truth?

J.L.C. Exactly that. He is the most recent model. Before that it was Robert Maxwell. The parallels are extraordinary. My sister, too, we absolutely recognize the same syndrome. There is not a grain of truth there.

S.L.Do you think the Russians really have something on Trump?

B.M. I can tell you what the veterans of the S.I.S. [the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6] think, which is yes, kompromat was done on him. Of course, kompromat is done on everyone. So they end up, the theory goes, with this compromising bit of material and then they begin to release parts of it. They set up an ex-MI6 guy, Chris Steele, who is a patsy, effectively, and they feed him some stuff that’s true, and some stuff that isn’t true, and some stuff that is demonstrably wrong. Which means that Trump can then stand up and deny it, while knowing that the essence of it is true. And then he has a stone in his shoe for the rest of his administration.

It’s important to remember that Putin is a K.G.B.-trained officer, and he thinks in the traditional K.G.B. way.

J.L.C. The mentality that is operating in Russia now is absolutely, as far as Putin is concerned, no different to the mentality that drove the most exotic conspiracies during the Cold War. It worked then, it works now. As far as Trump, I would suspect they have it, because they’ve denied it. If they have it and they’ve set Trump up, they’d say, “Oh no, we haven’t got anything.” But to Trump they’re saying, “Aren’t we being kind to you?”

B.M. And today you get this wonderful Russian lawyer woman [Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was in the pre-election meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr.] who is straight out of one of our books, a character that is possibly connected to the Russian state. Who knows? They exist somewhere in that foggy, deniable hinterland. It’s called maskirovka — little masquerade — where you create so much confusion and uncertainty and mystery that no one knows what the truth is.

J.L.C. For Putin, it’s a kind of little piece of background music to keep things going. The smoking gun might or might not be the documents exchanged about the Trump Tower in Moscow [which Trump is said to have been planning to build]. Then there’s the really seedy stuff in the Caucasus. There are bits of scandal which, if added up, might suggest he went to Russia for money. And that would then fit in with the fact that he isn’t half as, a tenth as rich as he pretends to be.

Throughout the lunch, le Carré and Macintyre discussed spies they knew personally, or knew of: Russian spies, MI6 spies, double agents and old retired spies who have a habit of looking up le Carré when they visit Britain. Macintyre brought up Kim Philby, the subject of his 2014 book, “A Spy Among Friends,” and one of the notorious group of double agents in the 1950s known as the Cambridge Five. On his first trip to Russia, in the late 1980s, le Carré was told he could meet with Philby, who had defected and was living in Moscow. (Philby died in 1988.)

J.L.C. It was before the wall came down and our ambassador had interceded with Raisa Gorbachev. I met a lot of people like Kim Philby’s Russian minder and other spies. That was when I was offered the chance to go and meet Philby.

And I refused to do so. I felt a spurt of hatred. I felt, “If he wants me he can’t have me.” I didn’t want to give him comfort.

B.M. Do you regret it now, David? Do you wish you had?

J.L.C. Out of human curiosity. But I feel now, as I expect you do, that I have a very clear portrait of him. He was much more intelligent and charming than was reasonable, and also wicked. He loved what he was doing. Betrayal was his element.

S.L.And now, David, have you said goodbye to Smiley?

J.L.C. He’s steadied me through my writing life. He’s been a kindly hand and a wonderful writing companion. I think he holds the conventional key to me. I think all of us, whether writing fiction or nonfiction, have to identify with our central character, but with Smiley it seems like a dialogue. But he’s said all he has to say. Also, he’s about 120.

B.M. He’s earned his retirement.

S.L.You’re doing an interview with the German news media after the Royal Festival Hall event. What will you do after that?

J.L.C. I really think that it will be my last performance in public. And I will be 86 by that time, so I should look at reality. I may have one more novel in me. And if it’s not good, I have a whole team of unkind selectors who will tell me. I always thought that Graham Greene, for instance, went on for too long.

S.L.But it’s hard not to write, if you’re a writer, isn’t it?

J.L.C. It’s the only thing you can do, in a way. I cannot stand idleness. I cannot stand not writing.

S.L.Do you feel you’ve come full circle or closed the door on a part of your life?

J.L.C. I guess this is, for me, some sort of celebration. I feel that I’m just about grown up enough to face the truth about myself.